Over the last six weeks or so my regular output of spleen-filled tweets has dropped off sharply as I’ve hunkered down on a big writing project that ties together five years’ worth of research on the topic of mobile television. I first wrote on this subject during my PhD. coursework in 2006. Two recent purchases inspired my interest. The first was the LG CU500, which was one of Cingular’s first 3G phones. The second was a subscription to the print edition of the trade magazine TelevisionWeek, which by the spring of 2006 was running articles on mobile television’s implications for the television industry on a weekly basis. That first seminar paper became a presentation at the 2006 Screen Conference, and eventually developed into the article “Little Players, Big Shows Format, Narration, and Style on Television’s New Smaller Screens.” I continued to follow developments in mobile television over the next two years while I was writing my dissertation, the final chapter of which looked at the much longer history of efforts to make television mobile (and, by extension, to extricate television from domestic spaces and the pejorative gendered connotations so often assigned to them within the contexts of discussions about technology).
In the years since I first began writing on mobile television, quite a lot about it has changed. Cingular became AT&T Mobility. Slim-profile flip phones like the CU500 forfeited their status as high fashion fetish objects to touchscreen smart phones like the iPhone. And TelevisionWeek joined many other media industry trades in killing off its print edition. Along the way, the definition of mobile television underwent significant revision. When the project began, trades still used “mobile television” to refer to the on-demand delivery of short video clips to mobile phones over 3G networks. (I’ve written on some of the factors that shaped this conception of mobile television during the first half of the decade in another essay, which appears in the edited collection Television as Digital Media) By 2007, however, a new conception of mobile television – one that bore obvious debts to the technologies and protocols of over-the-air television broadcasting – was gaining prominence. This mobile television involved scheduled channels as opposed to on-demand clips, and transmitted in television’s portion of the radio spectrum, as opposed to over 3G networks.
My most recent essay on mobile television explores the contexts and the consequences of the transition between the clip-based on-demand model of mobile television that I first encountered on my CU500 in 2006 to the broadcast-style model that subsequently eclipsed it. Writing it led me to new sources, including policy documents and work by legal and telecommunications scholars, which in turn spurred me to think more about institutions than I had in my previous work on the topic. This essay is slated to appear in Media Studies Futures, a collection Kelly Gates of UCSD is editing for Blackwell. Portions of it will also constitute the backbone of the final chapter of my book manuscript, which I’m right now titling The History of Television’s Future: Technology, Convergence, and Reform.
On account of the essay’s length (including works cited, around 10K words), I’ve decided to break it up into a series of posts that I’ll publish on the blog over the course of the next week or so. Below the jump is the first, introductory section. (The full bibliography will follow). Standard disclaimer: This is still a work in progress, and I would very much appreciate any feedback you’d care to offer. And since this is a draft, I ask that you please contact me directly before citing it.
Edit May 27 2011: a .pdf of the entire essay is now available on scribd.
From Broadcasting to Multicasting: The Mobile Phone and “the Future of Television”
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Filed under: Writing, broadcasting, mobile television, new media, remediation, spectrum, telecommunications, television, vaporware
